Most Powerful Storm to Ever Hit Land Kills 10,000 in One City Alone

Though
the official death toll from Typhoon Haiyan now stands at 1,563, officials in the Philippines believe as many as 10,000 people were
killed in the city of Tacloban alone. The
typhoon, which struck the Philippines on Friday, is now being called
the largest storm surge in modern history.

Shattered
buildings line every road of this once-thriving city of 220,000 and
many of the streets are still so clogged with debris from nearby
buildings that they are barely discernible. The civilian airport
terminal here has shattered walls and gaping holes in the roof where
steel beams protrude, twisted and torn by winds far more powerful
than those of Hurricane Katrina when it made landfall near New
Orleans in 2005.

Decomposing
bodies still lie along the roads, like the corpse in a pink,
short-sleeved shirt and blue shorts facedown in a puddle 100 yards
from the airport. Just down the road lies a church that was supposed
to be an evacuation center but is littered with the bodies of those
who drowned inside.

According
to the Associated Press, the provincial governor of Leyte—the island
on which Tacloban is located—told his regional police chief that
there were approximately 10,000 deaths in Tacloban, most of them from
drowning and collapsed buildings. "There was death everywhere," one witness told the Los Angeles Times.

The local government in Leyte has declared a state of
emergency, and President
Benigno Aquino III has said he's considering declaring martial law in Tacloban.

About 1.7 million children live in areas affected by the
typhoon, according to UNICEF, and an estimated 90 percent of all housing in some parts of central Philippines were destroyed by the storm. "The
devastation is ... I don't have the words for it," Interior
Secretary Mar Roxas told the Associated Press. "It's really
horrific. It's a great human tragedy."